


Gone Fishing

by darkhavens



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Amputation, Cannibalism, M/M, Murder Husbands, Mutilation, Post-Episode: s03e13 The Wrath of the Lamb, Quadruple amputation, all of this is after the fact so not graphically depicted, enucleation
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-03
Updated: 2016-04-22
Packaged: 2018-05-18 00:03:51
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,817
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5890306
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkhavens/pseuds/darkhavens
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Freddie catches up with Will and won't leave him alone. She regrets it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Gone Fishing

"Well, well, well, if it isn't the BAU's own Lazarus risen; Will Graham, back from the dead. I certainly didn't expect to find you here!"

Will spun round, eyes wide, face drawn and harried, the fingers of one hand tangled in the straps of a cotton grocery bag. Spying the camera in Freddie Lounds's hands, he made a grab for it with his free hand. Freddie danced backwards, staying just out of reach.

"Hands off the merchandise, Graham. This camera cost more than your..." She looked him up and down, and winced. "More than your _everything_ , by the look of things." She shrugged. "Not that it would do you any good anyways. The pictures I got of you are already in the cloud, and you'd need a password to get at them." She smirked, and Will trembled. "So, let's talk. How's the better half?"

"The...What?" He blanched. "Do you mean Hannibal? Jesus, Freddie, do you believe everything you write? Wait, is he here?" Will whipped his head around, trying to look in every direction at once. His breathing accelerated to the point where it seemed he might be about to have a panic attack. "Oh, God, he's here, isn't he? That's why you're here! I have to go." He began patting his pockets, searching for... something. " I-I can't stay here. Too many people; too many blind corners. I gotta get my stuff before I-"

"Hey!" Freddie grabbed his arm as he tried to brush past. "I didn't come down here for you _or_ for Doctor Lecter. I'm following up an anonymous tip on something else entirely; some local politician selling children into prostitution, apparently, but I can't get anyone to talk to me. Trust me, I have no idea where Doctor Lecter is, though I really did think he was off with you somewhere, living the high life and snacking on the locals."

"W...Why? Why would you...?"

"Seriously? After that video of the two of you taking down the Tooth Fairy and then doing the lovers leap thing went viral, we had hundreds of people calling in reports from every continent, claiming to have just seen the two of you out at dinner, at the opera, stalking some old lady down the road, even doing your grocery shopping." Freddie raised a meaningful eyebrow and nodded in the direction of Will's grocery bag. "We got maybe half a dozen people who swear they saw one or the other of you alone, but the overwhelming opinion seems to be that if one of you survived, you both did, and here _you_ are, so...."

Will sighed, ran his fingers though his hair and then grasped a handful of it and tugged, hard.

"Murder Husbands, right. I saw the first couple of articles, but then I had more important things to do, like staying alive and in one piece."

He took yet another three hundred and sixty degree look around him, before turning to face Freddie again. "I know you say you're not here for me or...him, but you're here, and you've seen me, so basically I'm screwed anyway. I need to get out of here before he sees my face and exact location plastered across your website, so if you'll excuse me..."

And, just like that, he walked away.

Freddie followed.

"So, you're saying you really don't know where Doctor Lecter is? What went wrong? You two seemed...MFEO I believe is the acronym for it. What exactly did he do to take the...bloom off the rose?"

He twitched at the reminder, at the familiar name, but he didn't break stride, just turned off the main market way into a narrower street.

Freddie followed.

"C'mon, Will, you might as well tell me. It's not like you've got anyone else to listen to your tales of woe. Don't you want the world to know you're not dead or dining on... free range rude, I think was what he called them, the people he killed, right?"

Will turned another corner, and then another, moving deeper into the favella as Freddie trailed him, firing off question after question that he occasionally flinched from but never paused to answer.

And then he was opening the door of a tiny, tumbledown shack and sliding in, out of the sunlight and into the shadows.

 

Freddie, fearlessly, followed.

###

Freddie woke, naked, saran-wrapped to a rough wooden bench. Needle sharp splinters burrowed into her skin as she squirmed to assess the extent of her restraints. They were extensive, binding her from neck to toe, only her head left even slightly mobile, able to roll from left to right.

And so she rolled it, to the left, until she could see, sideways on, Will Graham perched on the edge of a shabby single bed, a bottle of water paused halfway to his mouth.

He grinned at her, and then drank half of it down in three huge gulps. Once he'd wiped away a few escaped droplets, the grin reappeared. Wider.

 _Too many teeth_ , whispered the tiny part of her, buried deep inside, that still reacted like prey. _Too much glee in his eyes._

"I told you fishing could be fun if you used the right lure."

Freddie frowned, mouth already open to fire back a rejoinder that he'd told her no such thing, when it became obvious that he wasn't talking to her, that his eyes were focused over the top of her head, somewhere in her blind-spot.

Suddenly pale, and with nothing to say, she rolled her head to the right, slowly bringing Hannibal Lecter into view.

She'd never seen him like this before, in casual slacks and an open-necked shirt, the cuffs turned back to expose tan, muscular forearms. He'd never looked quite so relaxed and comfortable, at ease with himself. It wasn't a reassuring sight.

"My darling Will, you never cease to amaze me. You didn't tell me you were going after such a big fish, or that you'd be using your old self as the lure. This would be why you wanted me to talk campaign donations in the good councilman's offices last week, and why you spent so long off in the bathroom. Bad clams indeed, you wicked boy."

Hannibal dug into his front pocket and pulled out his phone, slipping it into a ziplock bag as he murmured, "Thank you for letting me listen in; I've been recording the whole thing, of course, so we can...relive the moment, later.

"Now, Miss Lounds, about that password..."


	2. Ms Lounds Regrets

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Freddie is returned to Baltimore in once piece, it's just a much, _much_ smaller piece.

Freddie Lounds had been uncommonly undisruptive for a couple of weeks when a series of photos appeared on the front page of TattleCrime.com. They went live around breakfast time in Baltimore. Jack Crawford watched them load on his tablet’s screen and tasted nothing but bitter dread when he tossed back the last mouthful of his coffee.

The images were unusual fare for the website and its viewers. The first commenters suggested that maybe the site had been hacked, but then AvidFanB5160-8 pointed out that this was the second Friday of the month, the day usually reserved for Freddie’s ‘Murder Husbands: Where Are They Now?’ update, and wasn’t Hannibal Lecter notorious for his exquisitely prepared and artfully displayed meat dishes?

The photos, of exquisitely prepared and artfully displayed meat dishes, interspersed with scans of detailed recipe cards in a very precise handwriting that was painfully familiar to Jack, suddenly became a lot more interesting to the vast majority of TattleCrime’s readers. Even moreso, once the more anatomically-aware members began to tentatively identify human body parts on the serving platters.

Jack reluctantly called for backup while sitting at the first set of traffic lights to stall him on the journey from his house to Freddie’s apartment. The FBI, the BAU, they’d be all over the potential crime scene the moment they got wind of it, but those photos hadn’t been posted to taunt the FBI or the BAU, they’d been specifically aimed at him, at least some of them. The memories they invoked were so clear he could almost taste them.

#

The apartment was a bust. It looked like nobody had been there for weeks. The alarm was still set when they finally gained entrance with an assist from the landlord, and a thin layer of dust coated everything. Nothing seemed to have been disturbed; there were no signs of a struggle.

The refrigerator was empty of perishables, as was the fruit bowl on the table, and the garbage bins tucked under the kitchen counter were spotless. Someone had made sure the apartment was prepared to sit empty indefinitely.

In the bedroom, naked hangers bunched together at the end of one rail in the walk-in closet; a set of luggage in the corner was missing its middle child. The top drawer in a chest of four had space for five stacks of underwear but only three remained. 

The countertop and cabinet in the bathroom were both meticulously organised; bottles and vials, cosmetics, sprays and lotions, all arranged in military ranks. The precision only served to highlight the absence of a few select items, enough to keep a basic beauty regime going for a couple of weeks or so, according to the lone female officer in the room.

Jack was becoming more and more convinced that Freddie had packed for herself, had prepped her apartment for an extended absence, and then disappeared to who knows where, straight into the clutches of… He just hoped he was wrong.

#

Freddie’s lawyers, Cable and Pool, weren’t amused at how the FBI had invaded their client’s home. They had been in regular contact with their client, they informed the Bureau, and while they were not willing to divulge her location at this time, they stated that they had no reason to suspect the texts and emails were being falsified. The website was still being updated with small news stories undoubtedly written by Ms Lounds, so, until they were invited to invade Ms Lounds’s privacy, the FBI were kindly told to keep their noses out of her business.

Having his hands tied infuriated Jack, but there was nothing he could do but wait for the other shoe to drop. Or, as it turned out, for other photos to appear. And keep appearing. Every few days, a new set was uploaded to TattleCrime.com: one or more beautifully arranged meals, each accompanied by a recipe card.

Jack tried to get his superiors to accept the presence of the recipe cards as proof that Lecter was out there and up to his old tricks, but the argument was quickly, embarrassingly, derailed when one agent mentioned how his kid had downloaded a Hannibal Lecter handwriting font, and had gotten into trouble for using it on a homework assignment.

The photos gave away very little information that could be of any use to Jack’s continued, now strictly unofficial, hunt for Hannibal Lecter...and possibly Will Graham. They were uploaded via a chain of anonymizing proxies, and EXIF data had been scrubbed from every jpeg, though they kept checking in the hopes that something had been missed in the latest batch.

Each picture was carefully composed. Windows, when shown, had their drapes tightly closed; there were no newspapers or magazines in frame to give a hint at location or even local language; reflective surfaces were either covered or angled in such a way as to give no glimpse of anyone in the room. The various fruits and blossoms used to decorate the table and accompany the meat dishes were indicative of somewhere tropical, but Jack knew that Hannibal wouldn’t blink twice at the cost of buying imported goods, so even that wasn’t much of a clue.

When the readers at TattleCrime.com started a forum thread trying to guess what body part would be consumed next, Jack briefly considered trying to get the website shut down for obscenity or indecency or _something_ , but, as much as it pained him, it was the only source of potential information they had on Lecter still being out there in the world instead of feeding the fishes at the bottom of the Atlantic.

All he could do was wait. And watch. And hope.

#

Almost a month after the first photos appeared, Jack was woken by a phone call. He answered it, still half-asleep, blinking into the pre-dawn shadows of his bedroom.

“Hello?”

“ _Jack. Jack._ ”

“Who is this?”

“ _Jack, it's Freddie. I don't know where I am. I can't see anything... I was so wrong. I was_ so _wrong._ ”

It was Freddie Lounds’s voice, he was sure of that, but the words...the words were those of Miriam Lass. Jack’s jaw worked, but he couldn’t force a word out past the ball of _fury-loathing-guilt-uselessness_ that was lodged in his throat.

“ _Please... Jack. Please._ ”

“Fre-” The call was ended before he could finish saying her name, not that she would’ve or could’ve replied. Jack was certain down to his bones that the call was pre-recorded, timed to the split second to match the call he’d received those few, long years ago.

He dropped the phone and grabbed for the tablet on his nightstand, dreading what he was going to find on TattleCrime.com.

#

The main menu item of the day was a curl of meat that Jack recognised as tongue. Beside it, resting in a martini glass of crushed ice, beside a single white orchid blossom, sat a single eyeball.

The final photo of the series was a close-up of a door that Jack Crawford had come to know intimately. It reminded him, as he was sure it was meant to, of Miriam Lass, of Beverly Katz, and of Abel Gideon and Frederick Chilton and, lastly but never least, of Freddie Lounds. It was the door of the Observatory. 

He’d understood what it meant immediately, or at least he thought he had. That he’d arrived there on the heels of the local PD gave him cause to think otherwise. Well, that, and the ambulance that was already on site.

His cell rang as he unlatched his seatbelt, and Jack glanced at the screen to confirm the identity of the caller before answering with a curt ‘I’m already there. The team had better be on their way.’ Upon receiving a mumbled affirmation, he abruptly ended the call, unwilling to be drawn into any form of conversation before he‘d found out what the hell was going on.

#

“Look, I already told the det-”

The muscles along Jack’s jawline jumped as he shoved his badge into the EMT’s face. “And now you’re going to tell me. From the beginning.”

The EMT scrubbed a hand across his face and then sighed, weary but willing. “You’re the boss.” He squirmed slightly in the back seat of the squad car, trying to get comfortable, then began, at the beginning.

“Dispatch took a call from a guy claiming pre-existing spinal trauma that he’d just aggravated by tripping over his own crutch on the sidewalk, right here. She said he sounded real embarrassed, kept apologising, so, even though it was almost time for our break, Dyl and me, we took the call, figured it was gonna be a milk run. Ha!

“He was lying right there-” the EMT pointed to a patch of pavement about ten feet to his left, “-with one of his legs tangled up in a crutch. It looked painful, and there didn’t seem to be anyone else around, nothing looked suspicious, or out of the ordinary.” He shrugged. “We were about ten feet away from the guy when he raised his right hand. Dyl saw the gun before I did, and started cursing. Second time this month he’s been drawn down on; dude swears some old   
Polish guy jinxed him last year for knocking over one of his tchotchkes on a call.”

The EMT physically flinched from the sharpness of Jack’s glare.

“Anyhow, Gun Guy says to toss our radios and phones and shit, and to just lay down, right where we are, that everything will be okay if we don’t do anything stupid. He says there really is someone who needs us to stay alive, but, if he has to call another crew out to take care of her, he will. So, we toss everything and drop, and he gets up, taking the damn crutch with him, pulls out his phone and hits a button. Then he just stands there, leaning on the crutch, gun pointed at us, watching the road over our heads.

“So, I’m lying there wondering where the hell this is going when I see a Prius pull up behind the bus, and then all I can do is wonder just how badly this whole mess is about to go sideways. An older guy in a fancy suit gets out, looks over and _waves_ , then strolls around back and opens up the trunk, cool as you please.”

At this point, the EMT stopped talking, swallowed hard, and pushed the heels of his palms into his eye sockets. He breathed deeply through his nose for several seconds before lowering his hands and shoving them into his pockets. 

“He lifted out a...a… Jesus! I swear to God, I thought it was some sort of bad practical joke, part of a store mannequin or something. No arms or legs, just a torso with a head attached, and a lot of wild red hair. Like one of those fright wigs, you know? The ones attached to ugly-ass clown masks? But the head flopped about until he got it tucked against his shoulder, and-”

The EMT closed his eyes again, obviously picturing the scene as he slowly shook his head from side to side. “He reached back into the trunk, unhooked an IV bag from somewhere, and I...I realised it was a person, or half a person, at least. Didn’t weigh much either, not the way he was able to move it -her- around. He got them both into the back of the bus like it was old hat, like he’d been doing it forever.”

Jack closed his eyes for a moment to contain the rage, opening them again as the EMT continued his tale.

“He wasn’t in there more than five minutes, just enough time to get her settled and hook up the IV, administer a fresh dose of...something. We found a used hypo on the bench, not one of ours,” he explained, reading the question in Jack Crawford’s coldly furious eyes.

“Then Suit Guy jumps down and comes over to Gun Guy. He puts an arm around his waist, kisses his cheek, turns to us and says, with some kind of European accent going on, ‘Now, gentlemen, we will take our leave. Please, don’t try anything terminally heroic. Once we’re gone, you are free to attend to your patient. She’s had a rather hard time of it lately, I’m afraid. Travel accommodations have been rather...cramped, a regrettable necessity.’”

The EMT shuddered slightly, and shoved his hands even deeper into his pockets.

“I’m not gonna forget a word of that any time soon. He had this tiny smirk as he said it, like it _might_ have been regrettable, but he didn’t actually regret it. And then he just walked off, back to the car. Gun Guy, using the goddamn crutch for support, if you can believe that, goes sideways so he can keep the gun trained on us right up ‘til he has to turn away to get the passenger door open.

“We stayed down ‘til they were gone, then Dyl insisted on checking out the...her. I made him wait while I called for backup, but then we both went and looked.” His eyes glazed over as he revisited an obviously distasteful mental image. “I’m gonna spend the rest of my life wishing I hadn’t. Dyl too, I reckon.”

He took a deep breath, and then continued, speaking faster now the end of his story was in sight, wanting it over and done with.

“She was strapped down, covered in a sheet, and it looked like Suit Guy had taken the time to fuss with her hair before he left. It was all spread out behind her head, like a halo in one of those old religious paintings? That was when I noticed her ears were gone, like most of the rest of her.”

His face was pale, and his voice quieter, as he continued, “Now, I can recognise surgical scars when I see ‘em, any half-decent EMT can, and when we pulled back that sheet, it was obvious she had way more than her share. And they weren’t all done at once, either. There were some I’d guess were weeks old; the newest barely a few days or so. Expertly done, and with excellent aftercare too; there was no sign of any complication or infection, far as I could see. Whoever stitched her up knew what he was doing.”

Lifting his head, the EMT locked his gaze with Jack Crawford’s and held it.

“She’s still in there too; you can see her screaming behind the eye they let her keep. She can’t scream for real, of course. From the look of the scar on her neck, I’d guess her vocal cords are either severed or gone, and she has no tongue. But, if you can figure out a way to communicate with her, I bet she’s got one hell of a tale to tell.”

Jack’s head whipped sideways to stare at the ambulance, and the EMT let out a subdued derisive snort.

“Backup came with a second bus, man, she’s long gone. Check with dispatch in case they rerouted her.” The EMT hugged himself, shivering slightly in the early morning chill. “Can I go now?”

#

Jack waited for his team to arrive and take charge of the ambulance before heading off to the hospital to see...whatever was left of Freddie Lounds. He also had his office put in a call to Cable and Pool, who were apparently the closest thing Freddie had to anyone who would give a damn. The FBI had tried and failed to dig up a family member who might be willing to file a missing persons report when the photos had kept coming; her lawyers were all she had.

Embarrassingly for Jack, it took three days, and the intervention of an overly curious retired US Navy physician, before anyone realised that Freddie Lounds was trying to communicate by blinking in Morse Code. Once she was sure that Jack could understand what she was saying, she spent five minutes cursing him out, then another two telling him that Will Graham had made a point of making sure she learned Morse Code before letting Hannibal remove her tongue and destroy her vocal cords. Then she cried herself to sleep.

When she woke, Jack discovered that she did indeed have one hell of a tale to tell.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title adapted from the song 'Miss Otis Regrets', because my mind is a dark and twisted place.
> 
> Tags have been added to reflect the new, more gruesome, contents of the fic.


End file.
